On so many issues, the left’s passionate indignation is in direct proportion to their towering ignorance. Especially when it comes to Aboriginal affairs. These are, after all, the people who made Bruce Pascoe’s idiotic, made-up ‘history’ a bestseller and made the fraudster race-shifter a well-paid academic, which is like putting Erich von Däniken in charge of the Large Hadron Collider.
Then there’s ‘deaths in custody’. The left are as convinced that Aboriginal Australians are being willfully murdered in Australian jails as their American thought leaders are that police are openly hunting unarmed black men in the street. Naturally, both are completely false. But the left passionately hold on to these views because they’re completely ignorant of the actual facts.
Try asking a leftist how a ‘death in custody’ is defined, in Australia. They’ll splutter something about ‘dying in jail’. They certainly won’t know that ‘death in custody’ includes, not just “deaths in institutional settings (e.g., police stations or lock-ups, police vehicles, during transfer to or from such an institution or in hospitals following transfer from an institution)”, but in any police operations “where officers were in close contact with the deceased”. These include sieges, but also “most cases where officers were attempting to detain a person”, such as pursuits.
They’ll almost certainly be ignorant that a death is defined as a ‘death in custody’ if it occurs within 24 hours of actually being in ‘custody’.
So, if Ol’ Mate gets released from jail, goes home and hits the drugs to celebrate, and ODs – ‘death in custody’.
And they absolutely will not, ever, be aware that far more non-Aboriginal people die in custody. Not least because their left-media echo-chamber won’t tell them.
The ABC has been remarkably quick to report on the recent death in custody of an Aboriginal man in Alice Springs. Further, they reported it over and over. No surprises there. One of their headlines reads ‘Demands for answers after ninth First Nations person dies in custody this year’. My response is to answer their question with another question: ‘ABC, why are you not interested in the 24 deaths of non-Aboriginal people in custody this year?
Because that doesn’t fit The Narrative. Nor does the fact that, statistically, Aboriginal Australians are safer in jail than they are in Aboriginal communities.
Nor does the fact that Aborigines are less likely to die in custody than other groups.
Don’t just take my word for it. Consider the words of the late David Biles. For three years, he was the head of the criminology research group of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, making him a very credible voice on the topic. Quoting Biles from the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016:
“In fact, in the early days of the royal commission, when I and a small team of researchers were able to prove unequivocally that Aboriginal people were slightly less likely to die in prison or police custody than non-Aboriginal people, we were met with derision and disbelief. We were even accused of disloyalty to the royal commission.”
Attacking the messenger and crying La-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you! is the left’s standard response to anything they don’t want to believe.
While arguably, there is a high number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, this is simply because there is a high number of Aboriginal people in custody to begin with.
In fact, the very Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody which the media and race activists tout so loudly, pointed this out: “not because Aboriginal people in custody are more likely to die than others in custody but because the Aboriginal population is grossly over-represented in custody”.
So why are the incarceration rates for Aboriginal Australians so much higher than for non-Aboriginal Australians? Firstly, it’s not due to systemic racism, as some still insist. In 2014, Don Weatherburn, who was formerly executive director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, stated that the over-representation of Aboriginal Australians in prison is not because they are disproportionately targeted by police for committing minor offences or because they are treated more harshly by the courts than their non-Aboriginal counterparts.
No, they’re over-represented in prison for the simple fact that they commit crimes at far higher rates than the rest of the population. If you don’t want to end up in custody, not committing crimes is a pretty good way to avoid it.
And spare me the palaver about ‘intergenerational trauma’. If intergenerational trauma really was a one-way ticket to collective failure, where are the gangs of Jewish-Australian kids refusing to go to school and running amok in the streets every night while their parents drink themselves into a violent haze?
So the race-baiters want ‘truth-telling’? They can’t handle the truth.
